Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“ The Edith Barnette? You’re serious? She must be eighty if she’s a day.”

Barnette had been vice president in the momentous Amin administration. She had been deeply unpopular at the time, and had taken much of the flak for the pain of Amin’s mighty economic restructuring; she never followed Amin to take the White House herself. But historians had come to recognize Barnette as a key architect of the whole Stewardship program, and as a driving force in getting the necessary policies through Congress and into international governance. Of course all that was a long time ago.

“She has no formal power, of course. But she has contacts all over the Hill, and in the UN, and of course the Stewardship councils.” Makaay smiled, his VR image flawless. “In my world, Michael, opinion is currency, worth far more than gold — far more even than conventional political power. And if we can get Barnette on our side we will go a long way to swinging the debate our way, believe me.”

“But what if we fail?”

“If it isn’t a showstopper Barnette will forgive us. She’s one of the few of her breed smart enough to do so. And she’s always had her heart in the right place, Michael. She understands what we’re trying to do here — or she will by the end of the big day.”

Even though Barnette would be there, personally I would much rather have stayed home. I had had my fill of traveling, and had no desire to haul my weary ass all the way up to Alaska, the roof of the world. But Shelley talked me into making the journey. We had to trust Makaay’s instincts, she said again. Otherwise why work with him?

So I acceded; I traveled to Alaska.

But as I slogged through my long journey, a whole series of more or less dreadful plane hops, I kept in mind my other agenda, the mysterious and spooky business of Morag. The whole issue was upsetting, and was isolating me from my family and friends, but I couldn’t wish it away. I had a deep gut instinct that my strange contact with Morag was just as important as anything else in my life. I was determined not to let it drop — though I had no real idea how I was going to pursue it. Somehow, I knew, Morag would come to me.

It turned out I was one hundred percent right.

The plane flew in over a vast brown plain, and the ocean was a steel sheet across which waves rippled tiredly. There was not a speck of blue or green to be seen on land or sea.

Prudhoe Bay was one of a series of oil fields spread along the northern coast of Alaska: the North Slope, as the locals call it. The complex of drilling facilities stretched for about two hundred kilometers along the coast. There were scores of drilling pads, marching off across the land. In each pad you could see the central rig facility, a gaunt dinosaur-skeleton of rusted iron, surrounded by small boxy buildings. The ground between the pads was cut through by straight-line roads, now disused, the tarmac crumbling and coated with mud. It was a very strange sight from the air, an alien forest of iron and tarmac.

I was stunned by the scale of it. Once, I knew, this had been the largest single industrial facility on Earth. The rigs had sucked up oil from kilometers down, and as in those days the sea coast had been ice-bound for most of the year, the oil had been sent south through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline across more than a thousand kilometers. It was a complicated irony that the Warming, by causing the final retreat of the sea ice, had opened up the north Alaska ports all year round; if only the Warming had come a little earlier they wouldn’t have had to go to all the trouble of building that thousand-kilometer pipeline — but the oil shipped through that immense pipe had itself contributed to the Warming.

Now, of course, the rigs were obsolescent, but the rumps of the old oil companies still owned these facilities, and were loath to abandon decades of infrastructural investment. And so the area had become a kind of adventure playground for large-scale industrial experimentation: that was why the EI engineers had chosen to come here for their trials. Plus it was American soil, which made a big difference in permissions, administrative support, and other bureaucracy. Makaay told me it was a lot easier to attract visitors to American territory than abroad, even to a place as remote as this.

I landed at an airstrip outside a small town called, unpromisingly, Deadhorse.

My automated cab from the airport gave me a profoundly irritating commentary, as if it imagined it was a tourist bus in Manhattan. Once, the cab told me, the hotel I was heading for had been the only accommodation available to visitors. But now that the oil industry had imploded there was plenty of accommodation to be had on the old drilling pads. There were even theme parks, where you could play at being a rigger, with grubby jeans and a hard hat.

Outside the town, the ground was churned-up mud where nothing grew. Once this area had been a vast swathe of tundra, like Siberia. But as the permafrost melted, the delicate tundra ecosystem had just melted away, too, and just as in Siberia the people had gone, the subsistence-hunter types who had endured here for millennia.

Deadhorse turned out to be barely a town at all; grim, functional, it was like an industrial yard. Many of the small, boxy buildings were abandoned altogether, their roofs collapsed, concrete walls cracked. As we drove in through this decay and abandonment along a thin strip of silvertop, the light was failing, the day ending. It felt as if the walls of the world were closing in around me.

The hotel was basic, just a series of two-story blocks. There were long corridors of rooms that stretched on and on, like a prison, and the flat heavy light of the fluorescent strips embedded in the ceilings washed out any color, any vitality.

The automated reception facility told me a fault had developed with the systems in my room, where an oversensitive chemical toilet had developed a habit of spitting unwelcome waste back out at its unlucky user. An animist had been summoned from Fairbanks to administer therapy, but wouldn’t be here until the morning. In the meantime I could take a chance with the angst-ridden toilet, or switch to a room with a shared bathroom.

The hell with it. I took the switch.

My room was just a box. It was clean and reasonably bright, with a little alcove where you could make coffee. But everything was old, the pipes rusted, the plaster and skirting boards crudely repaired, and dirt and grease had accumulated in cracks in the walls.

I threw my clothes into the small cupboard, and headed down the corridor to find the shared john. The toilet was none too clean, the shower just a nozzle over a stained bath. The water looked clear, but smelled suspiciously of chlorine.

Back in my room, I used the very basic VR facilities to contact my party.

Everybody was here in Alaska, Tom and Sonia, Ruud Makaay and his people, Shelley and some of her colleagues, even Vander Guthrie. I was too tired to do any business that evening, but would have enjoyed company, I guess. I longed to see Tom again, a deep cell-level impulse. But he knew I’d been with Rosa “telling ghost stories,” as he put it, and he was pissed with me, and I didn’t feel up to any more rows. Meanwhile Shelley was finalizing details for the demonstration due the next day. Everybody else was working, or had crashed out. A bit wistfully, we all promised to meet up in the morning.

I rolled into bed and watched some news. There was actually a relevant item: more instances of localized hydrate release around the Arctic Circle, more water spouts and clouds of lethal gases. I guessed it was local interest up here.

I was dog tired, my eyes felt like they were coated with sand, but I found it hard to rest. My muscles ached from all the long hours of sitting around on planes, and I felt tense, full of energy that needed burning off. And though it was close to midnight the sun was still up; this was Arctic midsummer. The light that leaked around the edge of my curtains was bright, not quite like daylight, enough to throw off my body clock.